DEUTSCH ❄ FRANÇAIS

Dear friends,

The Christmas letter.

We have moved house. We still live in Leipzig, but we moved into the “Old Army Bakery”. The red brick warehouse was built between 1895 and 1897 as a grain storage for the army, in the meantime it was used by the nationally-owned enterprise VEB Grain Trade and subsequently the pastries combine Leipzig and now we had the chance to move into a wonderfully spacious apartment here. This was only one of the major events of the year that I am happy to share with you, as is tradition.

My working environment has been markedly technologised. In trainings, I do not fiddle with camcorder, notebook and cables anymore, but have everything on a tablet and send the contents of the screen over Wi-Fi to a Chromecast. At university, students have to learn the fundamentals of my phonetics lecture with the help of short video clips and in return, I do not have to start at zero in class. This meant that in September I had to explain 14 weeks’ worth of lectures to the camera in three weeks.

In the summer, phonetics transported me to the other end of the world, to Melbourne. Last winter still, I had worked feverishly on my data and now got the chance to present it. Melbourne is nice, though that it was November in August, did not quite amuse me. Therefore, on my flights there and back home I had to heat up in Singapore and Bangkok respectively. In Bangkok, the air-conditioning stopped working when you removed your key card from the reader by the door. When I asked for a second key card in that matter, a young employee tried a dozen loyalty cards and fake credit cards instead. When ultimately the reader would not be fooled by this, another young gentleman with headlamp and screwdriver was called and the card reader bypassed.

Organising a national congress for 150 participants on a weekend, I had already done twice. Organising a weeklong global congress for 250 people, which is what the ISU 3D World Congress was and which took place in Lübeck in August, is quite a different story. Thank God I was not congress manager, but enough work remained to be done by me still. Beforehand, when my day came to an end in Melbourne, the morning had only started in Germany and I was sent texts for translation and proof-reading. On site in Lübeck, it took several hours to fill the name badges and a complete sweatfilled morning to pack the conference packages. But it was the greatest congress that I have experienced so far, first and foremost because by now I have found so many friends that I meet at such events and that brighten up my life.

When Olaf asked me if I would like to spend our holiday on an alpine pasture instead of in a city as always, I first asked him who he was and what he had done to my husband. But friends had invited us to their house and gave us a tour of Switzerland. Impressive was the high fog that floated through the Franco-Swiss Alps and also the quaint mediaeval town of Gruyères, though overrun with tourists it certainly was. Splendid and very Swiss a thing called construction profiles: We learnt that if you wish to build, you need to mark out the contours with stakes and flags, so that neighbours can get an idea and protest if deemed necessary. In Basel, Olaf and I spent a relaxed weekend together afterwards. At the paper mill, we watched how paper is made and printed. We took the ferries across the river that move only by force of the current and ate more rösti than is recommended for the year by the World Health Organization.

If I draw a conclusion, I am happy I would say. In the last year, I have seen clearer what I still want to and also can achieve in my life, but also what may be out of reach and what I do not need in my life anymore. At any rate, we should have a drink together next year. When I look back, I do not mind the long hours of work, but these are not the moments that I carry in my heart either. Let us create some memories next year!


Frank Lorenz